


and come my love again

by but_seriously



Series: until we get there [4]
Category: Legacies (TV 2018), The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Time Travel, bingo bangers, but it's also a time travel fic lmao stay with me, kcbingo2020, tumblr writing prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:14:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24789070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/but_seriously/pseuds/but_seriously
Summary: She watches him with interest. "I thought you maimed first, ask questions never?”“Maim isn’t kill.” Klaus grins. “Maim is slow, painful, yes, but it gives them just long enough to plead their guilt, swear fealty to me, no? My maiming is my mercy.”“You write poetry or something?”Klaus laughs quietly. “I did some editing work for Shakespeare, for a fashion. Can’t say I’ve ever written anything, no. My talents lie elsewhere.”(or, Klaus, Caroline, and a spell gone wrong.)
Relationships: Caroline Forbes/Klaus Mikaelson
Series: until we get there [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1686289
Comments: 5
Kudos: 148





	and come my love again

**Author's Note:**

> ~~i debated for a while whether to include this in my 'until we get there' series, as opposed to my KC Bingo series. then i thought that it fit, sort of a pre-canon to the canon of my Legacies verse.~~ lmao i changed my mind it doesn't really belong here, considering the canon i've imbied for that universe, so it's going back to the Bingo pile.
> 
> i got a prompt on tumblr a few days ago (five headcanons about klaroline & time travel) and thought - hey, it sort of fits in with one of the prompts in @klaroline-events’ june bingo: curse.
> 
> two birds, one stone? is that allowed? anyway, if it’s not allowed it’s okay, i had fun writing this all the same! another one for my drunk writing: a series tag, which as usual was written in one sitting whilst i giggle throughout.

**[sweetness that i took for, sweetness that she gave me to me](https://highgaarden.tumblr.com/post/621270593097072640/klaroline-time-travel-please-for-the-inbox-game);**

_though my heart has long been given to you_  
_summer’s turn is nigh_  
_swifts and swallows swoop and yearn for you_  
_with all that’s in the sky_  
_but blow the wind_  
_and come the rain_  
_and come my love again_

**i.**

she’s on the ground when she comes to. her head’s a mess and her back hurts, and she licks the inside of her dry mouth, suddenly wishing for blood to coat her parched tongue. 

the last thing she remembers is Freya, Davina, her own twins and Bonnie standing in formation around Hope; some kind of spell to slow down her age or something. she’s in her twenties and every day Klaus grows more and more volatile about it, so it was deduced that something had to be done.

in that salt circle Hope didn’t look too happy about it. last night there had been a huge argument between father and daughter - everyone had stayed well enough away, even Hayley, who shrugs at her as if to apologize this was how their girls’ summer break from the Salvatore School was going.

“ _minutes ut horis et diebus et hebdomades_ ,” Bonnie and Freya chant. 

Hope groans.

“ _quantum pugillus capere potest_ ,” Lizzie and Josie continue, fingers clasped together, their eyes turning white. 

Hope snorts.

“ _ex harenae spatia velutI clepsydris metiuntur_ ,” Davina bellows as wind starts whipping the air around them. 

Hope rolls her eyes.

“ _tempus extendit!_ ” they chorus together.

the witches chant and Hope checks her wristwatch, and then a storm rolls in, breaking everything. the twins are flung to different ends of the room; Freya loses her footing and has to dig her nails into the floor to avoid being dragged out the window that’s burst open; Bonnie bleeds through her nose and drops to her knees; Davina flings herself over Hope when the little baby Tribrid starts to convulse–when it hits her, when it really hits her, that something has gone terribly wrong–

she’s on her back. in a cemetery, her throat is bleeding and Tyler - _Tyler?_ \- is shouting down at her, but she can’t hear anything he’s saying.

she raises her hand. around her wrist, a charm bracelet glints, and her vision blurs: “ _no_ ,” she gasps, death taking over. she hasn’t worn that bracelet since her eighteenth birthday.

**ii.**

Klaus sits on the edge of her bed, his gaze swallowing her. she hears a crooning in her ears that she attributes to the werewolve venom taking space in her veins, smoking out the seams of her. she is burning up; this isn’t real - how is this real? this isn’t happening - she must be hallucinating, she was a woman in the abbatoir watching as a spell self-destructed, and now - 

she was a girl again, and she was dying.

“what’s going on?” she whispers, frustrated even as gravity as she knew it malfunctioned around her, making her weightless yet heavy to the bone all at once. “this doesn’t make any freaking sense.”

“me persuading you, trying to save your life?” Klaus cocks his head to the side. it’s funny - he is so hard and unreadable here, so many years ago. he wore his rosaries and beads like they meant to be anything more than an accessory peaking just underneath his collar - he wore them like they armour; a badge of honour, hard worn after a bloody, grisly fight. and yet looked and smelled clean. so clean it cut through the putrid leaking out of her neck. “you _do_ think so low of me, then.”

“didn’t I just say that?” she coughs, splattering her blanket with a fine red mist. this wasn’t how it had gone the first time around. he was sitting there, staring at her, those same old hungry eyes she remembers even years later like a broken dream. she can’t help herself. she stares him down, much like the first time, but then - her mouth parts, she licks her dry, parched lips, and says, “i’ve seen so many things.”

Klaus, ancient monster Klaus who barely knew anything more about her than her name, Klaus, the being just short of an omniscient deity,old as blood and weathered as a mountain - he doesn’t laugh. he nods, once, hearing and listening. he says, “I don’t doubt that, sweetheart.”

she almost smiles. she’s oddly satisfied. “maybe I am ready to die.”

“then you’re lucky,” Klaus says, “not many are.”

“because you don’t give them the chance,” she says, coughing again. man, werewolf bites sucked. this memory got it down so perfectly, she would curse the witches’ powers if she weren’t so impressed.

“who says I don’t?" 

she watches him with interest. "I thought you maimed first, ask questions never?”

“maim isn’t kill.” Klaus grins. “maim is slow, painful, yes, but it gives them just long enough to plead their guilt, swear fealty to me, no? my maiming is my mercy.”

“you write poetry or something?”

Klaus laughs quietly. “I did some editing work for shakespeare, for a fashion. can’t say i’ve ever written anything, no. my talents lie elsewhere.”

she thinks about the wisp of his dress shoes against the hem hre ballgown. Klaus leading her into a room with wide, arched ceilings. _one of my passions_ , he said.

“I know,” she says, quietly, with so much rueful affirmation in her voice that Klaus reels back suddenly. as if realising he was sitting with someone who was far more familiar with him than current logic would suggest.

it felt like strange company to be having on her death bed. he had talked her out of dying last time. would he, again, in this memory?

was this a memory?

she thinks about how powerful the witches were in their own right. she thinks about their combined power. she thinks about how her blanket scratches heavily against her drenched, hyper-sensitive skin. 

she’s not sure this is just memory.

and - and if it weren’t just a memory, and the spell they’d tried casting had tried to temper with time, and she was here, in the PAST, was she - oh god - was this - ?

“Klaus,” she gasps, clutching at his hands. Klaus’ eyes widen.

“I don’t know who you think you are, _girl_ ,” Klaus begins in a snarl, but everything flashes bright and hot - 

**iii.**

“and how am I doing?”

he knows his lines by now. he had been confused, enraged, elated all at once when he’d first landed slap dab in the middle of a patch in time he’d already lived through, but he’s seen things in his thousand-and-something years, so he wasn’t all that surprised. he’d tried to switch things up at first, say things he’d held back all those years ago, and watches Caroline’s face change.

it was fascinating, seeing things all over again. it offered him perspective. arguing with Caroline but being able to detach himself from the moment and study all the ways that make her tick. knowing her for so many years now, he knew when she was bluffing. it was the way she would refuse to meet his eyes. back then, she never met his eyes.

stubborn little woman.

she turns. her gaze was sharper than the chill of the uncharacteristically cool spring afternoon. and then all at once she softens, and the bloom around her inexplicably gain more colour. the rest of the pageant dulled around her as she grew larger than life. “you look… perfect.”

he’d never realised that little breath she had let out - like he had met her expectations yet again. exceeded them, in fact. she held herself carefully around him, like she was made of thousands of little strings which would at any point unravel, leaving her bare for him.

odd, because he could only ever remember her being determined not to relinquish any control over to him. it had never occurred to him that her grip over it wasn’t as unwavering as he’d thought.

**iv.**

Caroline speeds through these scenarios she didn’t have a name for, now that she had determined their level of harm - they appeared to only be swaths of time, ripped to shreds, trying to come back together. she wondered about the reality of Bonnie, Freya, her girls and Davina’s ministrations.

what had they done to Time?

she couldn’t call it memories, these moments she steps into. maybe time was reconstructing. her meetings with Klaus weren’t in any chronological order. at some point they were in her office, two years ago, him pleading with her to help him save his daughter. experiencing it the first time around hadn’t been easy. the second - she could watch him with new eyes and notice all the other, smaller ways he seemed to be falling apart. the things she’d never noticed. 

like the way he could stare at her, and oh how he stared. the way he would level his eyes to hers when it looked like she was ready to break eye contact; he would catch her gaze and _hold_ , pulling her back, tethering her to him, unrelenting.

he’s looking at her right now as he shows her his paintings. it’s the night of the mikaelson ball all over again, and she is in her gifted dress and Klaus is in his relish of the moment. how she had come to him after letting him dress her. now that she’s older she knows now, what it must have meant to him. this small claiming, the first of many.

but there is none of the heat in his gaze, because he’s not _that_ Klaus yet. he’s not in love with her, yet. he’s not looking at her as if he’d like nothing else than to just press the very tips of the hair that brushed his forehead to hers, just hold her there, and not think for a while.

yet.

she knows how this will go. did Klaus know, then?

“you make it sound like it was the easiest decision in the world,” she finds herself saying, “choosing me.”

Klaus looks surprised. she’d interrupted him mid-rant about some kind of debate, michaelangelo vs donatello or whatever. “was I not making myself clear enough when I said I fancy you?”

“liking - despite yourself - that’s not choosing.” she gives the half-done sketches in her hands a quick glance before putting them back where she’d found them. “we both know I'm not just your fancy of the week.”

Klaus’ face clouds over. “and here I thought courting you would be easy.” it sounds like a joke, but it’s not. she can hear it in the sudden shift in his voice, how it becomes just that much silkier.

“you didn’t really think that,” she says knowingly, playing into his charade. enjoying the danger. some things never really change, she wants to laugh.

a small smirk breaks through the hard set of his mouth. “no, I really didn’t. you’re too smart to be seduced by me.”

Caroline blinks. her own words, in his mouth, shouldn’t startle her so much. how well he knew her, even having just met her. “that’s why you like me,” she says. only just loud enough for him to catch it.

he doesn’t say anything. just lifts her gloved knuckles to his lips and kissed her there.

**v.**

she makes an excuse to leave. Klaus is unwilling to let her go so easily but he’s playing at being a gentlemen, because back then he’d thought she’d received him better. it was kind of adorable in a way, if it didn’t vex her so much.

what was happening? where the hell was she? why was she stuck in a weird loop of all her interactions with Klaus? was Hope okay? when was she getting out of here?

she walks on, the trail of her dress getting dirty and muddled in the damp earth. she could smell in the air that it was going to rain, and yet she walks and walks and walks through the lawn of the mikaelson estate until she reaches the edge, and the air around her wrinkles and gleams, as if trying to force a doorway through.

she… takes a step forward. and another. she goes easily through the barrier - she almost wonders if she’d imagined it.

she’s still in the mikaelson estate.

so she keeps walking - until she sees a familiar figure ahead. 

it’s Klaus.

she gulps. had he come look for her after all, shucking the gentleman and bowing to the monster?

she keeps walking. until she’s close enough to see that he’s looking a little more dishevelled than he did at the ball. his bowtie was lose around his neck. he’d lost his jacket, and his sleeves were rolled to his elbows. 

he looks at her. the way he’s always looked at her.

she breathes in. “you’re here too,” she says on the exhale.

“enjoy the ball?” he asks, in lieu of a confirmation. he eyes her in the dress. “I almost forgot how lovely you looked, that night. I never knew if you kept the dress.”

“I did,” Caroline laughs, shakily. “deep in the back of my closet, hidden from prying eyes - but not well hidden enough.”

a corner of Klaus’ lips quirk. “tell me.”

“my girls found it,” Caroline shrugs. “and Hope wore it to her miss mystic falls pageant.”

“did she win?” he asks, hungry for this bit of information about his daughter in the years he was dead, lost to time. 

“of course she did,” Caroline half-smiles. “she was in the care of Lizzie’s craftful hands. I raised my daughters in my image. not all - just the good bits.”

“I love all your bits,” Klaus says. he smiles at her, softly, cataloguing how she looks now, in the dress he’d given her years and years ago. “you loved me for far longer than i’d thought, Caroline.”

Caroline, to her credit, doesn’t blush. no, she’s too much a woman now. denial had lead her nowhere for so many years. “gonna gloat about it now?”

“nah,” Klaus says, putting his hands in his pockets as they fell into step, into the cold night. 

the grass, almost frozen in the morning dew to come, crunch under their feet. they walk until they reach his lake, because of course the mikaelson estate would have a lake. Klaus pulls his hands out of his pockets and offers her his arm, which she takes, and leads her to the bench that overlooks the reflection of the night sky on still, dark waters.

“I wish you’d taken me here instead, that night,” Caroline says, still in that casual offhand voice she’d adopted since meeting him. “way more romantic.”

“I thought you would’ve been averse to romantic, so soon after we’d met.” Klaus shrugs. “also, the full force of my courtship would have had you on your knees, Caroline. a man has to start slow.”

“I thought you would’ve liked me on my knees,” she says impishly, and he nearly falls off the bench.

god, Klaus had died and come back to life so many times a creature that just refused to go quietly - and yet with her he’s this fumbling bashful boy. she nudged him with his knee, through the many delicate layers of her dress. “how was your trip down memory lane?”

“enlightening,” he says mysteriously. she doesn’t bother to hide her grin.

“so was mine,” she says. “all those times you must have wanted to rip my head off. I was a daring idiot.”

“not an idiot,” Klaus argues. “sure, you could have held your tongue at any point - but you were certainly daring. you bore the brunt of my affections for you like armour. any lesser woman would have crumpled.”

she doesn’t meet his gaze, but he catches her chin before she can look away. “no, love. none of that, please. we’ve come so far.”

he’s pleased when she bites her bottom lip, understanding. he never had to explain herself with her. she was always perceptive, always listening, always deciphering. his clever Caroline.

“so has Hope,” Caroline says, and Klaus groans quietly. “she’s the brightest kid at the school, Klaus. she knows her power and knows her limits. she can benchpress the boys under the table,” she laughs in recollection, and he can’t help but join in, “and you can’t do anything about her growing, Klaus.”

Klaus sighs. long and wrought out, and in pain. “I have missed so many of her years.”

“what are you going to do, stall her even more? let her miss out on the beauty of aging, with Lizzie and Josie?” Caroline catches his eye. “they’ve become family, our girls. we are family now - let them grow and know loss.”

he’s a bit dumbfounded by the wisdom she’s displaying but has time to clear his throat and say, rather gruffly like when he’s trying to mask awkwardness, “we’re not a family. not really. you have Alaric, and…”

“and Alaric is my business partner, the father to the girls,” she says sternly. “Alaric is not… you.”

it’s weird, his gaze has been on hers all along, but it’s like he’s refocusing, seeing her for the first time. “what are you saying?”

“I'm saying that I didn’t just come to new orleans because the girls wanted to spend summer break there.” she licks her lips nervously. “I'm saying I came for me, too. it was a really nice holiday, Klaus.”

“before I bungled everything up, I expect,” Klaus mutters. Caroline laughs a bit. the air around them had slowly warmed as their conversation lengthened, and was sizzling now, lighting up Klaus’ face in sparks of white and gold. “time to go back, sweetheart.”

“you should work on your apology to her,” Caroline says, taking his arm again, and follows him as he stands and steps right into the middle of their ritual earlier.

Lizzie and Josie were there, and Hope was in the middle of the twins sandwich - Freya and Bonnie were consulting a grimoire and Davina was drawing chalk on the floor. they all looked up and stared at them, jaws dropping.

“looking good, dad,” Hope says, impressed, then her eyes land on Caroline in the dress. “oh my gosh - it looks like it was made for you.”

“um, it was hers?” Lizzie says, snorting. “can’t believe you’re on honour roll.”

“ _Lizzie_ ,” Josie chides. she tilts her head at Klaus and her mother, looking them up and down, the way her mother’s hand was wrapped loosely in the crook of Klaus’ arm, where only hours ago they had determinedly not touched this entire break. “so, weird trip?”

“you could say that,” Caroline says airily as the air re-seals behind them. “think something like a charles dickens novel.”

“cool,” Hope nods. she looks at her father expectantly. “what have we learned about messing with time, dad?”

“to not do it,” Klaus concedes grumpily. “now off you go before I lose my mind over that gray hair growing down your temple.”

“I do _not_ have grey hair!” Hope gasps, affronted, and storms the room, the twins giggling in tow.

“bet you wouldn’t mind some slow-aging spells for THAT!” Klaus calls after her laughingly, and she must have heard, Tribrid senses and all, and mutters something about him might being right.

**Author's Note:**

> please comment!


End file.
